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Thinking of changing from Kaspersky to free antivirus

swr_e007

Posted 06 January 2010 - 01:47 AM

In the past I have used McCaffe - which I found troublesome, lots of locks ups and complaints from the software.

I replaced this with Norton Anti-virus. No problems with the application running, but it hamstrung the performance of the PC by a very noticeable degree.

Currently I have Kaspersky 7. This seems to have been more reliable than McCaffe and less resource hungry than Norton.

But... a few months back I got a tojan infection which Kaspersky was no help with at all. It didn't see it, it didn't stop it, it couldn't find it and it couldn't fix it.

I had to visit here and got excellent help to remove the infection in the malware removal forum.

Today I got the 'Kaspersky is about to expire' message. On visiting there site it appears I basically need to buy the latest software ($$$!) and I get a small discount as a current user. It seems that shopping around some dealers can match or better this discount, so not much incentive.

I realise that no virus software can be 100% with a new virus, but I've spent a lot of money over the last few years and still succumbed to a nasty trojan - are the bought virus checkers really any better than the free ones? Enough to justify the cash? If so, any idea which to go for? (free or chargeable?)

Since this forum got me out of a big mess recently I would welcome your advice, please.

Essexboy

Posted 17 January 2010 - 09:17 AM

Essexboy

GeekU Moderator

GeekU Moderator

69,964 posts

And to add to Ron's comment Avast are about to release version 5. I have been running it in beta now for a few months, and it is lighter and faster than the 4.8 version plus the registration has been simplified . They have also added a behaviour shield which looks for suspect behaviour when a programme runs, found nothing on my system yet

Essexboy

Posted 17 January 2010 - 09:52 AM

Essexboy

GeekU Moderator

GeekU Moderator

69,964 posts

Notification will be released by the usual green popup but my current understanding is that the 4.8 version will need to be uninstalled first due to the changed architecture - but they are working on getting the new version to do all that for you